Night Sky 2 Reversed (2002)

About this artwork

Celmins's intense monochromatic images, based on photographs, focus on small and individual marks in the context of vastness. The images seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a camera which is ephemeral and frozen in time. Celmins's serial exploration of her subjects, including spider webs, allows the artist to exploit the distinct characteristics of the variety of media she uses. This negative image of the night sky turns the sky white and star formations are transformed into black markings.

Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins

Born in Latvia in 1938, Cemins and her family emigrated to the United States in 1948. Although beginning her career as an Abstract Expressionist painter, she is now best known for her intricate, monochromatic drawings of a select range of subjects. In 1966 she began to use photographs as the subject for her works, creating what she described as “impossible images” which remind us of the complexity of the simplest things. These meticulous renderings of the surface of the ocean, expanses of desert, the night sky, or a spider’s web, demonstrate her fascination with the surrounding world. With a slow, painstaking approach, some of these works take up to a year to complete.

Related group

Night Sky 2 Reversed is a three-colour, multi-technique print on medium weight, off-white Hahnemühle Copperplate paper that depicts a negative version of a starry night sky. It was printed and published by Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) in Los Angeles in an edition of sixty-five. The copy held by ARTIST ROOMS is edition number 34/65, inscribed at the bottom left corner of the print, and signed and dated by the artist at the bottom right in pencil. It forms a pair with Night Sky 1 Reversed (2002), of which the copy held by ARTIST ROOMS has a matching edition number, 34/65.

The star-filled composition of this print – as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings – is based on a photograph rather than direct observation of the night sky. Among the works by Celmins in ARTIST ROOMS, this strand of starry imagery is prominent: prints like Mount Holyoke (1987), the four-part seroesConcentric Bearings (1984–5), and the charcoal drawing Night Sky #19 (1998) all make use of a constellation, galaxy or night sky photographic source. The artist has discussed her relationship to these source materials:

I have millions of night sky images and they’re all unsatisfactory. They’re all flat photographs and they’re printed. I like that printed quality. It’s my job to make them satisfying and put them in the real world as real textural objects. I’m redescribing the image in another medium that’s real, that has some substance.
(Quoted in Seymour 2001, p.55.)

In its visual and textural redescription of the night sky image, Night Sky 2 Reversed combines four different printmaking techniques, with each method applied to the copper etching plate separately. The first is photoetching: an intaglio process that coats the plate with a light-sensitive ground which is then exposed to a photographic image and etched with acid (see Gemini G.E.L. Online Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,http://www.nga.gov/gemini/glossary.htm, accessed 22 June 2010). This is followed by aquatint, a ‘method of etching in tone’ that produces a print quality similar to a watercolour wash, and is here used to achieve a finely textured surface onto which the photogravure process is transferred using light-sensitive gelatine and water immersion (see Lambert 2001, pp.60, 67). The final stage involves drypoint. This is an intaglio engraving technique, which means that the design is incised and the ink is sunk into the resulting grooves beneath the surface of the metal plate (see ibid., p.38). Drypoint is essentially a form of linear mark-making, and inNight Sky 2 Reversed it has been used to render the smallest and most detailed black ink stars. This print has a double margin: inside the rectangular impression of the plate mark there is a hand-drawn and slightly irregular inked border line, from where the image begins. This dual reinforcement of the contained image plane is a reminder of the image’s photographic origins – the vast, dispersed field of stars cannot spread out infinitely, as it is restricted by the definite limits of the foundational rectangle of information, selected by the camera’s viewfinder and recorded on the negative film.

Unlike its partner print, in Night Sky 2 Reversedthere is very little incidental linear marking of the plate surface, with a more even coverage to the background. The star ink spots look especially painterly, and yet the endlessness of the sky is given a restrictive frame. The print represents a vast, far away section of space, but the stars appear like miniscule marks, closer to a random, abstract pattern than an astronomical rendering. Half of the stars appear etched, half appear to derive from photogravure (these have more tonal variation). Looking closely it is possible to see the tiny particles that comprise the celestial matter. It is highly granular, reinforcing Celmins’s claim to create ‘real textural objects’ from her photographic sources. In conversation with the curator Anne Seymour, the artist commented that:

one of the things about the night sky images was the image became a little more abstract and a little less specific. By making a drawing in a very careful and sensuous way, I think that’s where the specificness goes. It’s really a drawing first, and second there’s an image kind of emerging from it.
(Quoted in Seymour 2001, p.54.)

This comment holds equally true of this print, where the complex relationship between the variously achieved set of engraved, etched and photo-mechanically produced marks is given precedence over the specificities of the night sky detailing, and indeed the photograph itself.

Jupiter Moon – Constellation (1983) is a dual-image print combining mezzotint and etching that depicts a photograph of one of Jupiter’s moons together with a constellation image in reverse. Celmins has remarked of Jupiter Moon – Constellation that ‘the Jupiter moon is such a fabulous image, which I found in one of my travels through bookstores looking at pictures. At the bottom of that print is a reversed galaxy, an image that I’m interested in again now’ (quoted in Rippner 2002, p.23). This final comment refers to works such as Night Sky 1 Reversed and Night Sky 2 Reversed, which were produced almost twenty years after this first appearance of the inverse constellation motif. The reversed night sky also features in a painting made one year before these two prints, Night Sky #18 (2000–1) (reproduced in Lane Relyea, Robert Gober and Briony Fer, Vija Celmins, London and New York 2004, p.141). These works demonstrate the persistence and longevity of this subject matter, migrating to different facets of the artist’s practice across a substantial period of time.